The Big Reap (16 page)

I'm getting ahead of myself. First I should tell you about the almost-murder.

We'd been trudging along for what seemed like forever, on jagged nerves and terrain to match. The afternoon was getting on, and the long shadows cast by the mountain ridge to our west bathed us in chill gray half-light like crushing depression, dulling colors, numbing limbs to sluggishness, and settling creaky into our every weary joint. My feet were blistered. My camera-shoulder ached. And my head was throbbing, on account of Topher and Zadie's bickering, which had begun as the occasional potshot a few miles back, only to escalate to a vicious barrage as the afternoon wore on.

Topher, early on, all brittle false-cheer: “C'mon – pick up the pace back there, woman! We got monsters to catch!”

“Quit hogging the water!” Zadie, later, whining.

“What're you, stupid? We're not going that way, it's too steep.” Topher, evening the score a few paces later. And then they were off to the races.

“You're the one who marked the route, dumbass. Can't you fucking read a map?”

“Better than you can read a fucking sonar readout.”

“Jesus, does it
always
have to come back to that bullshit in Loch Ness?”

“Bullshit?” Topher got up in Zadie's face, all pointy and indignant. “How can you stand there and call it bullshit? That sonar image was
definitive
.”

“Definitively a piece of driftwood.” As Topher got closer, Zadie made a face, squinching up her nose and eyes. “Holy hell,” she said, “when's the last time you washed that shirt? It smells like gym socks soaked in Patchouli and bong water. I'm gonna lose my fucking lunch here.”

“More like both our lunches, the way you've been packing it in.”

“Excuse me?”

“I'm just saying, I thought I made it pretty clear I packed the ostrich jerky for
me
.”

“Well then maybe you shouldn't have put it in
my
pack. Oh, wait! You needed room in your pack for that goddamned travel guitar, because God forbid I go one night without having to hear your horrible playing. You'd think in seven years, you would have learned
one
chord.”

“You never complained
before
.”

“You sure about that? Or is it that you couldn't hear me over the fucking racket you were making? Long as you insist on torturing me with that thing night in and night out, I'll finish the goddamn jerky if I goddamn well feel like it. And you're one to talk about putting on the pounds; your gut looks like fucking cookie dough pouring out over that stupid-ass belt buckle of yours.”

“You sound just like your mother. And you told me you liked this belt buckle!”

“I swear to Christ,
Christopher
, if you tell me I sound just like my mother one more time, you'll be bunking with Nicky, you hear me? And believe you me, there's
plenty
of stuff I've said I liked that I'm mostly just enduring.”

“You know I hate it when you call me Christopher! Christopher is my
dad's
name. And anyways, it's fucking rich, you teasing me about my name – your given name is
Susan
. You stole Zadie off the cover of a book, one you never even
finished
, for shit's sake.”

At that last, Zadie looked directly into my camera, worried that she'd been outed to the world. (No chance: it wasn't recording, and anyway, I'd been zooming in on a cool-looking bird some twenty feet behind her.) Then, after one stricken moment of paralysis, she wheeled on Topher, and smacked him square across the jaw.

I was surprised. In my time with Topher and Zadie (Chris and Susan?), I'd seen 'em bicker plenty, but nothing ever came of it. They were peas in a pod, or whatever the hippie drum-circle equivalent would be. Macho and hembra bongos, I guess. (What? That's what they call the big bongo and the little one, respectively. Or maybe it's the little and the big. Okay, I may've been spending way too much time with these two.) Point is, I'd never gotten a whiff of violence repressed in their prior interactions. Which made the slap surprising, and what came next goddamn terrifying.

Topher looked at her a moment, shocked silent. Then he shrugged out of his pack in one quick motion and tackled her, his hands around her neck.

Zadie let out a squeal that became a gurgle as his thumbs pressed against her trachea. I belted out an involuntary “
Hey
!” and moved toward them to stop Topher from killing her. In my astonishment, I clung stupidly to the camera on my shoulder. It had become so much an extension of this meat-suit in my mind – so accustomed was Nicholas to carrying it – I simply never thought to drop it. It was a stupid move, because the weight of the equipment slowed me down, and could have cost Zadie her life, but in retrospect, my idiocy proved helpful. But not before we three tumbled down the embankment.

It happened like this. I leapt onto Topher's back, and tried to ride him to the ground. He would not relinquish his grip on Zadie, who was already off-balance from his attack. My weight plus the camera made him top-heavy. He tumbled forward onto her, me still on his back and then rolled into an awkward somersault, taking me along. His hands released her neck, too late to prevent her from tumbling after us. So the three of us rolled down the steep decline, maybe twenty feet all told, but the pitch was such it was more falling than rolling.

We hit bottom and scattered like jacks. I landed flat on my back with a hollow
whumph
and a plume of breath like a pair of bellows being squeezed. For an agonizing second, new breath just wouldn't come, and then finally my diaphragm listened to what my lungs were telling it and got back to work.

I found my feet and looked around, disoriented. Heard a shuffle of nylon ripstop, caught a glimpse of matching winter jackets through the trees, one following the other in hot pursuit. I had no idea what the hell had come over these two today, but I figured I ought to join in the parade. And so I did, the camera dangling behind me from its strap, its choking weight slowing me down enough I thought I might never catch up. But they weren't running for long.

Up ahead, I heard a scuffle, and then a sickening crack. Like a gunshot. Like broken bones. I worried it was Zadie's neck and put on whatever little speed I could with the camera pulling back on me like a yoke. In seconds, I spotted them, and breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn't Zadie's neck that snapped. It was her walking pole, which had apparently just broken in half. Unfortunately for Topher, said walking pole broke in half because she brought it down atop his head.

Topher, who'd been grappling – buck knife drawn – with Zadie when she cold-cocked him, wobbled a moment on his feet. His eyes rolled back, his face went slack, and his buck knife tipped slowly in his loosened grip, eventually falling to the forest floor point-down. Its handle wobbled back and forth as it stuck, in imitation of its owner, perhaps. Then Topher's knees buckled, and he went down.

I looked at Zadie, who was still holding the handled end of the walking pole like a baseball bat, its lacquered surface now terminating in a jagged metal O, and then at Topher's crumpled form. Zadie looked back at me, wild-eyed and panting. Then she threw the pole away from her in disgust, as if it had transformed into a writhing snake, and whatever malevolent urge had come over the two of them evaporated. She dropped to her knees beside her unconscious lover, and called to me, voice pleading: “Nicky! Nicky, get over here, and bring the camera. I can't tell if Topher's breathing!”

I did as she asked, struggling out of the camera strap as I approached. She snatched the camera from me like a desert wanderer might a canteen. Then she held the lens up to Topher's nose and mouth, her face splitting into a manic grin of relief as it plumed with rhythmic condensation.

“Oh, thank God,” she said. “I thought I'd killed him. Hell, for a minute there, I thought
he
was gonna kill
me
.” She chucked Nicholas-not-Nicky's camera aside without a thought. It bounced off a jutting shoulder of exposed mountain rock, and its oversized viewfinder swung open on its hinge. Somewhere deep inside his own psychic prison, Nicholas-not-Nicky let out a wail of sheer gearhead angst. But I wasn't paying him any mind. Nor, if I'm being honest, did I care much that Topher had regained a sort of swirly-eyeballed consciousness, thanks possibly to Zadie's gentle if insistent slapping of his cheeks.

But I
did
care about what he was pointing at with one unsteady hand as he blinked his eyes into focus, his face a mask of punch-drunk confusion. “Nicky!” he stage-whispered with awed incredulity. “Nicky, are you effing
seeing
this?”

And as I said some time ago, Nicky wasn't. But
I
was, and once Zadie followed the trail of Nicky's arm down past his pointing finger toward the camera, she was seeing it too.

The camera, propped crooked on the rock a few feet from us, aimed at a gentle, treeless patch of upslope, gray and barren as the moon, and as empty, too. The camera's viewfinder was open. And in it was that same patch of barren, empty upslope, though in the viewfinder it was neither barren nor empty.

On it sat a small log cabin, rough-hewn and lichen-scabbed. It sat a quarter-turn away from facing us, its front windows staring blankly into the middle distance from beneath their brow of covered porch as if indifferent to our presence. A thin wisp of oily smoke twisted skyward from its chimney. A patch of tilled earth arranged in furrows – a garden not yet growing – rested on its southeastern edge, now deep in sunset's shadow. The cabin was still and quiet beneath the waning light. No light shone from within. And though for our entire hike the forest had teemed with life, it had apparently abandoned us now, for all was silent and still as a crypt.

“The fuck
is
that?” Zadie muttered.

“That,” I told them, “is proof.”

“Of
what
?”

“That the world's a weirder place than even
you two
yahoos realize.”

And then, before they knew what hit them, I attacked.

 

9.

“Ow! That pinches!”

“Does it?” I asked, giving the nylon line another tug. Topher wailed a little louder than was strictly necessary in response, if you ask me. But after the racket we made stumbling upon the cabin in the first place any attempt at a quiet approach was shot anyways, so I figured let him yell. “Good.”

We were huddled in a cave some three hundred yards from where the cabin stood. More a depression in the rock than anything. Not quite deep enough for a bear to settle down in, but not so exposed to the wind and elements that these two would freeze to death if I didn't come back until morning. Probably. I mean, I'm not a nature guide or anything. But either way, I figured they stood a better chance of surviving hog-tied and tucked away somewhere than if I let them storm the cabin with me. I'd lost enough lives taking on the tunnel Brethren – three shit-bags and one innocent – to learn my lesson. The only hide I'd be risking today was Nicky's – er,
Nicholas's
– and even that was one more than I'd ideally prefer.

“What the fuck, Nicky!” This from Zadie, who, near as I could tell in the failing evening light, was giving me the scowling of a lifetime. “I thought you were our
friend
.”

“If we're such good friends,” I said, figuring I'd throw the consciousness who, when I left, would once more be driving this meat-suit a bone, “then you'd know I hate being called Nicky. And besides, this is for your own good.”

“Yeah? How you figure?”

“Well, for one, believe me when I tell you, you want
nothing
to do with what's in that cabin. And for two, let's not forget whatever nasty juju they've enacted to keep folks from stumbling across it damn near made you two kill each other. But worry not, once I head in there and do my thing, you won't have either to contend with.”
I hope
, I added mentally.

“Since when'd you go all Venkman on us?” asked Topher. “I thought you didn't even believe in this shit.”

I rolled my eyes. “Venkman hunted ghosts,” I told him, “and was a huckster besides. If you're gonna drop a reference, think I'd prefer Van Helsing.”

“You mean that shitty movie by
The Mummy
guy where Wolverine wears that dumbass hat?”

“You know what?” I said. “Never mind.”

“Nicky,” Zadie said, only to shake her head and close her eyes by way of self-chastisement. “Nicholas,” she corrected. “You don't have to do this.”

“Do what?”

“Tie us up. Abandon us. Leave us out here to die.”

“Zadie, believe me, you have no idea what you're talking about. Because, in order, yes I do; no, I hope I don't; and leaving you out here's the best way I can think to keep you breathing.”

“If that were true,” she said, “you'd leave us our packs, at least.”

I eyed the backpacks lying at my feet – their zippers open, their contents strewn about. “You can keep your packs, and your food, and your clothes. All I need,” I said, patting my stuffed jacket-pockets, “I got.”

Topher glared at me. “Unless you're leaving us my buck knife, the whiskey, and our sat phone, consider yourself hella motherfucking fired.”

At that, I smiled. Because I'd be lying if I said my plan didn't include his buck knife and his whiskey, if not his sat phone. And oh yeah, not just a little bit of fire.

It was full dark now, and the moon was new. This far out from any human source of light, the stars and my conscience were my only guides. And I hadn't heard much from the latter of late.